In 2023, in concert with NAHR, and where the opportunities presented themselves, we concentrated on the theme of “Air.” Participants were encouraged to explore the function, mechanism, importance and state of air from a range of natural, ecological, social, political and ecological perspectives, and to reflect on the impacts of air pollution and air quality degradation.

How do we breathe when the atmosphere around us seems well-ordered and conducive to life, but our future is radically uncertain, even perilous? Or when we feel unwelcome or subtly or unsubtly aggressed? What occurs when we are met with disorganized breath in ourselves or others?

We’ve been continually called back to the challenge of refusing to see air as blank, as a void, or as a neutral space to be colonized with our inventions. This notion of empty air recalls the colonial tactic of seeing empty space—from terra nullius to aires nullius—a logic that permits the proliferation of settler-colonialism by disavowing other claims to and uses of air/space. The biological fact that our continuing to live depends on our body’s capacity to metabolize the air we have given ourselves, give each other, and is given to us, indicates that to project such a neutrality is itself a grand illusion. The circulation of air that sustains and kills us (us?) sutures us (us?) into a situated reality governed by the constituent material processes of the present totality’s production and reproduction, inclusive of its asymmetrically distributed violences.